Holmes: Aiming at the wrong target

The reason President Obama and others making a new push for gun control have an uphill climb isn’t so much the Second Amendment extremists who want to save their AR-15s for the revolution. It’s the ordinary folks who enjoy collecting guns and using them legally, without hurting anyone. When the government tries to make a popular pastime illegal, people resent it.

One fine weekend back in the 1990s, I was invited out to Hopkinton Sportsmen’s Club for an afternoon of lobbying and target-shooting. I did my best to commit as much gun violence on pieces of paper as I could (not much – my eyes aren’t that great) with an assortment of weapons.

My hosts laid out an array of guns before me and defied me to tell them which was subject to the assault weapon ban and why. The distinctions were entirely cosmetic: without the bayonet mount, one model was perfectly legal; the version with it was banned.

I left convinced that lawmakers at the state and federal levels had written legislation so riddled with vague definitions, loopholes and provisions easy for manufacturers to sidestep, as to be pretty much useless.

“Assault weapon” is a politician’s term, not a gun industry one. Previous assault weapon bans were aimed mostly at weapons that looked scary. But to someone who enjoys guns, looks and feel count. The AR-15 isn’t the biggest-selling gun on the market today because it’s the preferred weapon of mass murderers (though it is), but because it’s a good gun, that shoots smoothly and doesn’t have too much kick. A lot of people who served in the military developed an appreciation for those guns, and if the free market can offer guns to them that share the qualities they came to appreciate, fine.

Not that we shouldn’t take reasonable steps to keep civilian weapons from enabling mass murder. Lawmakers shouldn’t go after cosmetics, but they should restrict capacity. That means limits on high-capacity magazines. Jared Loughner was taken down in Tuscon when he paused to reload. The Colorado movie shooter was grabbed when his 100-round magazine jammed. I’d also ban civilian sales of armor-piercing bullets, at least until someone can convince me they have a purpose other than killing police.

It’s often said these rifles weren’t designed for hunting deer; they are based on military weapons designed for killing people. The truth is, they are also real good for putting holes in pieces of paper. That’s what law-abiding people spend their hard-earned cash to do.

The reason President Obama and others making a new push for gun control have an uphill climb isn’t so much the Second Amendment extremists who want to save their AR-15s for the revolution. It’s the ordinary folks who enjoy collecting guns and using them legally, without hurting anyone. When the government tries to make a popular pastime illegal, people resent it.

Measures aimed at stopping criminals from illegally obtaining guns ought to be an easier sell. The guns that do the most damage in city streets come from the “secondary market” – guns bought in quantity and sold out of the trunk of a car without background checks or sales records. Law enforcement officials say a small number of firearms dealers are responsible for a large number of guns used in crimes.

Page 2 of 2 - There’s a federal agency that ought to be able to help stem the flow of guns falling into the wrong hands without inconveniencing law-abiding gun hobbyists. But the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms has been systematically hobbled by a Congress that has for decades been putty in the hands of the gun lobby.

Congress bars the ATF from consolidating firearms sales records and restricts it from sharing firearms trace information with prosecutors and courts. It requires records of “instant checks” for firearms purchases to be destroyed within 24 hours. It has prohibited ATF from making its records available to law enforcement in digital form.

“If you want an agency to be small and ineffective at what it does, the ATF is really the model,” Robert J. Spitzer, author of “The Politics of Gun Control,” told the Center for Public Integrity.

There are plenty of ideas for reducing gun violence, some of them pretty good, some pretty lame. With 300 million weapons already in private hands, I’m not convinced weapons bans will have much effect. With violence so huge a part of popular culture, I don’t know how we can stop the damage done by those few people who can’t separate movies and video games from reality.

We ought to try, of course. But I think we’ll have more success by giving better tools to police going after those who obtain and use guns illegally than by harassing legal gun-owners who only pose a threat to paper targets.

Rick Holmes, opinion editor for the Daily News, blogs at Holmes & Co. He can be reached at rholmes@wickedlocal.com.